First you must understand our mission and purpose. When a party appears before one of our grievance adjudicators to decide a specific issue... An employee in a particular department may have raised a psychological harassment problem and filed a grievance. The grievance follows its path in the department itself. In some cases, it winds up before our tribunal. This is the adjudication part. Our adjudicators hear the parties personally or through their union representatives. They present their case and the adjudicator eventually decides the question and makes a decision. We have no settlement responsibility or duty.
Another function of our board is precisely to resolve disputes. That's the question you're asking. That's another section of our board. We have a group of trained people who are skilled and experienced in mediation. When there is a psychological harassment problem and either of the parties seeks our intervention, we go to the department in question to solve the problem through mediation.
Our mediation service is currently one of the best in the country, and I mean “in the country”. We have what we call a batting average of more than 80%. When we send in mediators, at the request of the parties, to solve psychological harassment cases or other problems—because a lot of problems can be raised—we succeed in resolving more than 80%.
You mainly emphasize the issue of psychological harassment. I don't have the figures, but I can tell you that we have less success in that area because it's a very difficult problem to solve. Having worked in the private sector for more than 30 years, I had to deal with this kind of problem. So I know that psychological harassment problems are very hard to solve. If the problem can be solved, our board will solve it. We've had very good success in this area and others.